Nature Images of the Year 2008

There's lots of astro piks in Nature's selection of images.

Fri Dec 12 2008

An interesting set of observations of the Einstein Cross, Q2237+030:

"Astronomers dissect a supermassive black hole with natural magnifying glasses"
http://www.physorg.com/news148316066.html

Stephen Hawking in Canada

He's got distinguished position with the Perimeter Institute, with longish visits anually.

See this short article.

Sweet Molecule Could Lead Us To Alien Life

New published in ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2008):

Scientists have detected an organic sugar molecule that is directly linked to the origin of life, in a region of our galaxy where habitable planets could exist.The international team of researchers, including a researcher at University College London (UCL), used the IRAM radio telescope in France to detect the molecule in a massive star forming region of space, some 26000 light years from Earth. Read the rest of the news here.

Body of Copernicus found

Excerpt from a BBC article:

Researchers in Poland say they have solved a centuries-old mystery and identified the remains of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.

A comparison of DNA from a skeleton in Poland and strands of the astronomer's hair found in a book in Sweden almost certainly confirm it is his skeleton...

There is even a picture of what he might have looked like!

A week on a volcano

During my awesome week long visit in November working on JCMT on top of Mauna Kea, I took some photos, as I always do. Click the early morning hour picture of JCMT below to enter my webalbum...

Discovery of a mysterious source of high energy cosmic radiation

Scientists have discovered an unidentified source of high-energy cosmic rays bombarding Earth from space. Researchers from the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) collaboration, led by scientists at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, published the results in the November 20 issue of the journal Nature. The new results show an unexpected surplus of cosmic ray electrons at very high energy — 300-800 billion electron volts — that must come from a previously unidentified source very close to the Solar System or from the annihilation of exotic theoretical particles used to explain dark matter.


"This is a big discovery," says John Wefel of Louisiana State University and Principal Investigator for ATIC, Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter, a NASA funded balloon-borne instrument high over Antarctica. "It's the first time we've seen a discrete source of accelerated cosmic rays standing out from the general galactic background." Read the rest of the news here or from here.

Wonderful committment to Education and Public Outreach

November 19, 2008

Ivan Semeniuk joins U of T's Dunlap Institute as Science-Journalist-in-Residence
Noted science journalist Ivan Semeniuk has joined U of T's new Dunlap
Institute as science-journalist-in-residence.

Semeniuk has been US-bureau chief at New Scientist magazine since
2005. Prior to New Scientist, he spent 12 seasons as a columnist and
then full-time producer with the award-winning daily science magazine
show "Daily Planet" on Discovery Channel Canada. Semeniuk was on staff
at the Ontario Science Centre for 13 years, where he developed
exhibits and science programs and was widely known for his radio and
television appearances as the centre's astronomy expert. He is also a
contributing editor to Sky News magazine, and has written for Sky &
Telescope, Astronomy Magazine, and The Globe and Mail, among other
publications.

During his tenure at the Dunlap Institute, Semeniuk will apply his
journalistic skills to documenting the world-wide quest to explore and
understand the cosmos. He will podcast, blog, and create online video
segments that will help open the ideas and lives of professional
astronomers to an international web audience.

"Having a science journalist at the Dunlap Institute reflects our
serious commitment to raising public awareness of science", says Peter
Martin, interim director and chair of U of T's Department of Astronomy
and Astrophysics. Semeniuk's term coincides with The International
Year of Astronomy 2009, a worldwide celebration of the 400th
anniversary of Galileo's first use of the telescope and the
contributions that the field of astronomy has made to our
understanding since that time.

Semeniuk holds an undergraduate degree in astronomy and physics from
the University of Toronto and a master's degree in science journalism
from Boston University. In 2007 he was named a Knight Fellow in
Science Journalism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His
astronomy documentary "Hubble's Canvas", which aired on Oasis Channel,
was recently nominated for a Gemini Award.

U of T's Dunlap Institute will further advance Canada's leadership in
astronomy and astrophysics. In addition to innovative programs in
public outreach, the Dunlap Institute will focus on research,
development of scientific instrumentation for world-class
observatories, teaching and advanced training.

Snapshots of Exoplanets

Every body and their sibling tried to scoop each other with, with their 'scopes, with "the first snapshot" of exoplanets.

Here's Gemini's family of planets - a solar system at http://www.gemini.edu/node/11151. It was also put out by LLNL (which used "snapshot") and probably Keck.

Here's HST's planet in a ring of dust at hubblesite:

What do you think of the word "snapshot?" It makes our work sound trivial to me... anyway heading out to take pictures of antennas and 'roos (if they are bounding about) as the sun goes down here at narrabri :-)

cheers jayanne

p.s. thanks for those magnetic baby photos harsha :-)

Clues on magnetic powerhouses by XMM & Integral

X-ray and gamma-ray data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) XMM-Newton and Integral orbiting observatories tested, for the first time, the physical processes that make magnetars, an a typical class of neutron stars, shine in X rays. Read the news here.

Phoenix Lander at mission's end

The Phoenix Mars Lander has not communicated since Nov. 2, and engineers from the mission assume the vehicle is now completely out of power. Therefore, at a news conference today, mission managers announced the Phoenix the mission is now officially over. "At this time we're pretty convinced the vehicle is no longer available for us to use, and we're declaring the end of the mission," said Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager. "We've been surprised by this vehicle before, and we're still listening. We'll try to hail Phoenix, but no one has the expectation we'll hear from it again. We're completely proud of what we've accomplished. We've achieved all of the science goals and then some."

As anticipated, the seasonal decline in sunshine at the arctic landing site is not providing enough sunlight for the solar arrays to collect the power necessary to charge batteries that operate the lander's instruments. And a dust storm at the landing site made the sunlight decrease even further, ending the mission a little sooner than the team had hoped.

As for any possibility of re-contacting the lander next year when spring returns to Mars' northern arctic, Goldstein didn't rule it out, but said its not very likely. "By the mid October (2009) time frame, there would be enough sunlight hitting the solar arrays to create power," he said. "But its highly unlikely the vehicle will come back. It will be encased in CO2 ice, in temperatures under -150 C. The solar arrays will likely crack and fall off the vehicle,… the electronics will become brittle and break, so the wiring boards won't work. But this vehicle has behaved so superlatively, we'll look again in October."

Can we get oil from space ?

Excerpts from a newspaper....

MOSCOW: Scientists from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh have said that judging by the chemical composition of stars in the Milky Way, our galaxy could contain anywhere between 300 and 38,000 highly developed extraterrestrial civilizations potentially capable of contacting planet Earth.

Cassini-Huygens, a joint robotic space mission promoted by US space agency NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, currently studying the planet Saturn and its moons, has discovered oil and gas deposits on Titan, Saturn's largest satellite. The estimated reserves exceed terrestrial deposits by some 100 times. Previous images received from Cassini-Huygens indicated rain and snowfall on Titan. Although the discovery of oil and gas deposits on this moon is hardly sensational, it could help scientists explain the origin of life on the Earth.

Many scientists and analysts say extraterrestrial sources of energy could provide humankind with enough heat and energy for hundreds of years to come and would help it cope with a snowballing energy crisis. The newly discovered hydrocarbon deposits inside 15 large lakes on Titan could provide enough power for all US heaters, lamps and air conditioners for hundreds of years. Hydrocarbons contained inside huge dunes covering 20 percent of Titan's surface exceed the Earth's coal deposits by several hundred times. In addition, some regions on Mars have high concentrations of methane. Next autumn, NASA plans to launch another Mars exploration vehicle for studying methane deposits on the Red Planet and their origin.

However, extraterrestrial deposits are highly unlikely to solve current energy shortages. First of all, we know nothing about the quality of Titan oil. Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) know only that a local lake contains ethane, a crude-oil ingredient. A manned mission to Titan is still the fantasy of science fiction novels and would face the same mind-boggling problems as a mission to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own solar system, at only 4.37 light years from the Sun. Moreover, even the most optimistic science fiction writers do not know when it will become possible to launch prospecting operations on Titan at minus 180 degrees Celsius. Also, no one knows whether the world will still require oil a hundred years from now when long-range space missions to other planets could become commonplace.

Famous Astronomers & Physicists

Some useful links :-)

Famous Astronomers

Famous Physicists

HST Servicing Mission

The servicing mission is delayed but the instruments have been turned back on ... this is the WFPC2 after it was restarted... click for the full pikkie...

Oct. 30, 2008     RELEASE : 08-280

NASA Managers Delay Hubble Servicing Mission

WASHINGTON -- NASA managers have announced that they will not meet a
February 2009 launch date for the fifth and final shuttle mission to
the Hubble Space Telescope. The decision comes after engineers
completed assessments of the work needed to get a second data handling
unit for the telescope ready to fly. The unit will replace one that
failed on Hubble in late September, causing the agency to postpone the
servicing mission, which had been targeted for Oct. 14.

Google and NASA are Working on an Interplanetary Internet

How nice it is to have an interplanetary internet -- our science and technology is advancing day by day ! Here's an interesting news I read from Universe magazine about launching an interplanetary internet to communicate between Earth and Space in a more effective way !

In an initiative energized by Google Vice-President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, the International Space Station could be testing a brand new way of communicating with Earth. In 2009, it is hoped that the ISS will play host to an Interplanetary Internet prototype that could standardize communications between Earth and space, possibly replacing point-to-point single use radio systems customized for each individual space mission since the beginning of the Space Age.

This partnership opens up some exciting new possibilities for the future of communicating across vast distances of the Solar System. Manned and robotic space craft will be interconnected via a robust interplanetary network without the problems associated with incompatible communication systems…

"The project started 10 years ago as an attempt to figure out what kind of technical networking standards would be useful to support interplanetary communication," Cerf said in a recent interview. "Bear in mind, we have been flying robotic equipment to the inner and outer planets, asteroids, comets, and such since the 1960's. We have been able to communicate with those robotic devices and with manned missions using point-to-point radio communications. In fact, for many of these missions, we used a dedicated communications system called the Deep Space Network (DSN), built by JPL in 1964."

"When we launch a spacecraft with a unique set of sensors onboard, we often end up writing special communication and application software that is adapted to that spacecraft's sensor systems and manipulators," Cerf said in response to the challenges space missions face each time they are designed.

The Internet uses standard TCP/IP protocols so billions of online entities are always compatible. Although there are limitations to the Internet, it has proven to be a highly flexible and scalable system, so with the help of Google, NASA hopes to push the Internet beyond Earth. "The Interplanetary Internet project is primarily about developing a set of communication standards and technical specifications to support rich networking in space environments," Cerf added.

This all sounds very interesting, but the challenges with building such a system require some novel techniques. How do you deal with the limitation of the speed of light? After all, it can take light 40 minutes to travel to-and-from Mars and up to 12 hours to Pluto and back. How do you cater for planetary rotation? The transmitters/receivers won't always be on the correct side of the planet. What happens if a satellite signal is blocked by a planet, the Sun or a moon?

Vint Cerf says the disruption of data transmission has to be confronted with a delay- and disruption-tolerant networking system, otherwise known as DTN. "It will allow us to maintain communications more effectively, getting much more data because we don't have to be in direct line of sight with the ultimate recipient in order to transfer data," he said.

DTN will be based on store-and-forward methods used by TCP/IP systems; if there is a disruption in signal, the transmitting station will hold data packets until the signal is re-established. However, DTN will be more robust, catering for long transmission lag-times (such as the many-hour light transmission times between Earth and the outer Solar System). "We have to cope with the fact that there is a really high potential for delay and disruption in the system," he added.

Standard TCP/IP protocol should also work seamlessly with the DTN, allowing planetary missions to have their own distributed Internet whilst using DTN as a link through interplanetary space.

Another Exciting ATNF/AAO Director's Tea!

An Invasion:

At one point the ATNF director, Brian Boyle (who used to be AAO director too),
was surrounded by Ingrid Stairs, Bill Harris, Dave Hanes, Terry Bridges and
myself and exclaimed "the Canadians are coming!" ... i sang a line of "O Canada" in french. Add Robert Braun to the end of the line we were sitting in and at least 20 percent of the attendees were canucks. As guests we took 2/3 of the seats and so most people were standing.

Of course Bill and Dave will give colloquia - Bill's is this arvo (afternoon) on
the history of elliptical galaxy evolution using HST images while Dave's on
Friday is on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.

And yet another way to detect pulsars (Robert Braun and Patrick*):

And the impact is on array configurations for SKA. If the spacings between
antennas are regular, then the fan beams overlap allowing one to digitally
produce beams between antennas. This creates a primary beam with a gain of
something like 12 in sensitivity compared to using one antenna on its own.
Ambiguities in position can be removed by observing the same target at 2
different times. This makes interferometers competitive with single dishes for
pulsar surveys, especially in compact configurations. What do you think Stacie? Regular in the compact centre and irregular in the outer regions of the SKA?

And science gets wackier all the time (Ron Ekkers and Clancy from Adelaide;
presented by Clancy):


What an enthused and assured presentation this one was! The idea is that
neutrinos interacting with the moon's surface will produce a nanosecond pulse in the radio regime (the moon's surface is rather transparent to radio waves). So
you look for a geometry in which CR from a strong source (like Centaurus A
region or Saggitarius A*) are grazing the moon's limb at night and you point
your array at that point on the limb closest to the CR source. If I remember
correctly this happens about 3 time in each of Feb, Mar and May. To date they
have got the instrument's timing to under a nanosecond (they bin in half
nanoseconds), have explored detecting quasars, and they think they have detected the observatory's visitor centre. :-)))) They have determined that they aren't
affected by wireless mice. And they are poised to begin their search for moon
pulses. Detections and non-detections alike, at a range of low frequencies,
will elliminate various exotic constructs for dark matter particles.

Comment by Brian, in reference to Dave's promotion of SNO: Now that we have the solar neutrino problem solved, we have to solve the lunar neutrino problem. :-)


P.S.

I had a most fantastic visit to Swinburne University of Technology's
Astrophysics and Supercomputing Centre. UM's Experimental Media Centre, me, Chris Fluke and David Barnes will set up a collaboration. 3D stereo desktop
monitors and 3D visualization astronomy tools exist and Chris is checking out
whether he can send a monitor to me at ATNF so I can play!!

* I seem to only catch people's first names the first time they are introduced.

Astronomy in Australia

It is very exciting to be at a site where there are 2 large institutes - Australia Telescope National Facility and the Anglo-Australian Observatory. So many good colloquia and discussions!

First there was a talk by Matthew Bailes from Swinburne Uni. He's director of the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.
He gave a talk on detecting pulsars using software techniques - improving FFTs and using their supercomputer (185 Dell dual cores). I'm going to visit Swinburne (in Melbourne) on Monday. Here's a great paper from their group on inserting 3D figures in pdf's http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/s2plot/3dpdf/
We should definitely do this for our papers! Please check it out Jason :-)

Then there was Wed morning coffee... very similar in intent to ours -- people talk about news and their own results and other people's work that they think is interesting. Except that there are 30 people (and only enough seats for 10) so it is very energetic. For example Simon Johnson described the gamma-ray pulsar that isn't found in radio - probably because the radio beam is narrower than the gamma-ray one and not oriented towards us. The ATNF director Brian Boyle pointed out that there is a new radio astro technique (low freq?) for detecting lensing in clusters - a Nature paper. Ron Ekkers pointed out a newspaper article that turned a paper's speculation into a discovery which led Helen Simm, their EPO/IYA person, to poll the group as to their feelings about this (e.g. do astronomers think this is inevitable? (yes) Do they accept/like it? (no) What can we do about it?) And Robert Braun, who grew up in Winnipeg(!) - i thought he was American+Dutch, pointed out a terrific technique to use when observing with Parkes. People also mentioned that their own papers (e.g. Naomi McClure-Griffiths' GASS survey) were submitted or accepted, generating congratulations from the attendees. (p.s. Naomi is pregnant :-))

And then there was a colloquium by Peter Kalberla who is also here on sabbatical. Terrific stuff! He finds a lagging, clumping HI thick disk and that the thin disk has an exponential distribution. Also he finds a Milky Way's dark matter model, which fits the HI flaring well, has a component that is an exponential disk that has a ring enhancement. One paper is http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008A%26A...487..951K
and he will be one of the authors of an Annual Reviews in Astronomy and Astrophyics article on the HI in the Milky Way -- first such article since Dickey and Lockman 1990. Which reminds me - Adam could you please put on your shelves the ARA&A and other astro texts (not binders or photos or beer bottles) from my glassed in cabinet? I believe theresa has the key to my office.

And then there is the Canadian contingent - all at one time or another engaged in globular clusters (including yours truly). Dave Hanes (Queen's U.) just walked into the canteen and was shocked to find me there. Bill Harris (MacMaster) will be here Tuesday for a couple of days. Terry Bridges (Queen's sort of) will be at the AAO for a month and we went on a hike and a swim in the Hawkesbury river on Sunday :-)

NGC 4945 will be my campaign while i'm here - i'll keep you posted. I'm working with Baerbel Koribalski and I'm going to the ATCA at Narrabri in the middle of Nov. Theresa is invited to do likewise in January. Also on the campaign will be Ken Freeman (KCF) and Mike Dopita (MAD) - we'll propose to use MAD's IFU on the 2.3 m at Siding Spring.

KCF was here on Thursday and jumped up to give me a big hug. He was sitting beside John Dickey, at a picnic table by the canteen, who exclaimed "Jayanne! i didn't recognize you!" I wonder if the gray hair is throwing people off :-))) At anyrate I think I have an invitation to visit John in Tasmania (King Island creme and cheese - here i come!) Lister Stavely-Smith however wasn't surprised - he's now at U of Western Australia working on the SKA pathfinder. These folk were visiting for some sort of committee meeting. I waved to Brian Gaensler (who don't think recognized me) and i'm sure i saw Jeremy Mould wandering the grounds too. I'm looking forward to seeing who else turns up!

Enjoy astrogroup coffee (feel free to pass this on to the astrogroup folk who aren't on the blog) and cherish the hunt for another UM research astronomer!
more later
galaxyGal

Chandrayaan blasts off -- launch successful !

India has launched its first Moon mission Chandrayaan 1 and placed in its orbit successfully. More details about this mission had been posted earlier in this blog. Please visit http://astro-umanitoba.blogspot.com/2008/08/chandrayaan-i-indias-first-moon-mission.html

More news on the launch can be found here: http://www.universetoday.com/2008/10/22/indias-chandrayaan-1-on-its-way-to-the-moon/

Pulsar - "Only in gamma rays, you say"

First gamma-ray-only pulsar observation opens new window on stellar evolution


Menlo Park, Calif.--About three times a second, a 10,000-year-old
stellar corpse sweeps a beam of gamma-rays toward Earth. This object,
known as a pulsar, is the first one known to "blink" only in gamma
rays, and was discovered by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard
NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a collaboration with the U.S.
Department of Energy (DOE) and international partners.

So starts the press release.  Note were it comes from - i was just in Menlo Park on the weekend (at a vets and a baby shower!) which is right by Palo Aalto which hosts the beautiful Stanford University. Menlo Park is a small clean and cute town with restored train station and shops in the "spanish colonial with a touch of victorian" style (well, the shower was in a "high tea" shop). 

More about the pulsar at:http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/gr_pulsar.html

On the light side...

First detection of magnetic field in distant galaxies

A team of California astronomers has obtained the first direct measurement of magnetic field ( atleast 10 times greater than the average value in the Milky Way) from a distant galaxy (DLA-3C286) as it appeared about 6.5 billion years ago, using the Green Bank Telescope operated by NRAO . They speculate that they might be seeing the interior regions of the massive galaxy where the magnetic fields are supposed to be greater or might be due to a shock wave generated by the collision of two galaxies (discovery is featured in the Oct 2 issue of Nature). Read the detailed news here.

Bad News about the Hubble

MEDIA ADVISORY: M08-187

NASA TO DISCUSS HUBBLE ANOMALY AND SERVICING MISSION LAUNCH DELAY

WASHINGTON -- NASA will host a media teleconference at 6 p.m. EDT
today to discuss a significant Hubble Space Telescope anomaly that
occurred this weekend affecting the storage and transmittal of science
data to Earth. Fixing the problem will delay next month's space
shuttle Atlantis' Hubble servicing mission.

The briefing participants are:

- Ed Weiler, associate administrator of the Science Mission
Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington

- John Shannon, Shuttle Program manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center
in Houston

- Preston Burch, Hubble manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
in Greenbelt, Md.

To participate in the teleconference, reporters in the U.S. should
call 1-800-369-6087 and use the pass code Hubble. International
reporters should call 1-773-756-0843.

As a result of the launch delay, NASA has postponed the planned Oct. 3
Flight Readiness Review and subsequent news conference. The review
will occur at a later date.

The malfunctioning system is Hubble's Control Unit/Science Data
Formatter - Side A. Shortly after 8 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 27, the
telescope's spacecraft computer issued commands to safe the payload
computer and science instruments when errors were detected within the
Science Data Formatter. An attempt to reset the formatter and obtain a
dump of the payload computer's memory was unsuccessful.

Additional testing demonstrates Side A no longer supports the
transfer of science data to the ground. A transition to the redundant
Side B should restore full functionality to the science instruments
and operations.

The transition to Side B operations is complex. It requires that five
other modules used in managing data also be switched to their B-side
systems. The B-sides of these modules last were activated during
ground tests in the late 1980's and/or early 1990, prior to launch.

The Hubble operations team has begun work on the Side B transition and
believes it will be ready to reconfigure Hubble later this week. The
transition will happen after the team completes a readiness review.

Hubble could return to science operations in the immediate future if
the reconfiguration is successful. Even so, the agency is
investigating the possibility of flying a back-up replacement system,
which could be installed during the servicing mission.

Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live at:
http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

Related images for the briefing will be available at:
http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

For more information about the Space Shuttle Program, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

To Join the e-bulletin of the American Astronomical Society's Committee on the Status of Women

9. How to Submit, Subscribe, or Unsubscribe to AASWOMEN

[Please remember to replace "_at_" in the below e-mail addresses.]

To submit to AASWOMEN:
 send email to aaswomen_at_aas.org
All material sent to that address will be posted unless you tell us
 otherwise (including your email address).

To subscribe or unsubscribe to AASWOMEN
 go to http://lists.aas.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/aaswlist
and fill out the form.

If you experience any problems, please email itdept_at_aas.org

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
10. Access to Past Issues of AASWOMEN

Past issues of AASWOMEN are available at

http://www.aas.org/cswa/AASWOMEN.html

Each annual summary includes an index of topics covered.
AASWList mailing list
AASWList@aas.org

Optically active magnetar -- more news on it.

Thanks Jayanne for posting this wonderful discovery news. Here's more info on it...

http://www.physorg.com/news141483335.html

For the Magnetar lovers.

The press release on

THE HIBERNATING STELLAR MAGNET

is at http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2008/phot-31-08.html

A pretty amazing silhouette!

Check out this link!

The dust in the outskirts of the foreground galaxy is made visible by being silhouetted  against the large background fellow. Apparently something not very common (but I'd like to see more examples!) Look at those tendrils of dust! 

Richard Feynman's lectures

Here is a wonderful website on the Feynman lectures (videos) and other interesting stuffs. I guess it will be useful to many graduate students (and of course, others too :-) ).

Click here to go the website

This website also features a few good science lectures, nobel prize interviews etc. I hope some of you will find it interesting !

From the AAS STATUS newsletter

3. ASP Resource Guide for Women in Astronomy

From: Hannah Jang-Condell [hannah_at_alum.mit.edu]

http://www.astrosociety.org/education/resources/womenast_bib.html

Women in Astronomy: An Introductory Resource Guide to Materials in English

by Andrew Fraknoi (Foothill College & Astronomical Society of the Pacific)

"This guide is not meant to be a comprehensive or scholarly

introduction to the complex topic of the role of women in

astronomy, but simply a resource for those educators and students

who wish to explore the challenges and triumphs of women of the

past and present. It's also an opportunity to get to know some of

the key women who have overcome prejudice and exclusion to make

significant contributions to our field. To be included among the

representative women for whom we list individual resources, an

astronomer must have had something non-technical about her life

and work published in a popular-level journal or book. This

explains why so many talented women are not covered; their work is

mainly known through journals that students cannot

read. Suggestions for additional non-technical listings are most

welcome, however."

Image of a star around a sun-like planet.

And hey it is a Canadian press release! Likely the first image of a planet around a star like our sun. Check out the release.

LHC -- a success !!

The LHC was turned on wednesday morning and it proved to be a success. Engineers cheered as the proton particles completed their first circuit of the underground ring which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Click here to read more about it.

There had actually been a huge speculation all over that the "world is going to end" when turning on the LHC (internet is flooded with such comments). I wonder how such scams take its toll on the people's mind and they tend to believe it hook, line, and sinker...

Naked Eye Gamma Ray Burst

hey weren't you watching? ;-)

"NAKED-EYE" GAMMA-RAY BURST WAS AIMED SQUARELY AT EARTH

WASHINGTON -- Data from satellites and observatories around the globe
show a jet from a powerful stellar explosion witnessed March 19 was
aimed almost directly at Earth.

Here's press releases.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/naked_eye_release.html

ESA material: http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2008/pr-28-08_2.pdf

Pairitel and Gemini material: http://astro.berkeley.edu/research/grbs/grb080319b.html

LHC

thanks Harsha. The link to the article was good too - here's that article about the formation of black holes in the LHC . It is on my site so it won't disappear too quickly. And for completeness sake here's the LHC rap You Tube video.

New Hadron Collider to start working by Wednesday

As you all know, the much awaited hadron collider is scheduled to be switched on by the scientists on the Franco-Swiss border at 12.30 a.m. on Wednesday with a purpose to find the missing links in the Standard Model of physics, a theory describing three of the four known fundamental interactions among the elementary particles. The interaction that has eluded the Standard Model is gravity.

The LHC is a 17-mile underground ring intended to smash opposing beams of 7 TeV protons into each other, in an attempt to recreate the after-effects of the „Big Bang.” Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the highest-energy particle accelerator is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 27 km at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 m underground.

The event taking place tomorrow has given raise to many a heated debate on the impact that switching the LHC on will have on our planet. While some deem Wednesday as being the *death day*, others say it will be a huge step towards unlocking the mysteries of the Universe, which is in no way to cause any damage to the Earth. And some, namely a pair of Russian scientists, think that the LHC will be the first time machine and expect creatures from the future to visit our planet after it begins its mission.

The data from the experiment will be used to solve the mysteries surrounding concepts such as dark matter, dark energy, and, most importantly, Higgs Boson. The latter, known as the “God Particle,” is the only particle that the Standard Model didn’t observe, although it has predicted it. The “Higgs boson” could explain how massless particles manage to construct mass in matter.

Click here for more news from astronomy.com

The edge of the Milky Way's black hole.

VLBI observations of Sgr A*
"The team clearly discerned structure with a 37 micro-arcsecond angular scale, which corresponds to a size of about 30 million miles (or about one-third the earth-sun distance) at the galactic center. With three telescopes, the astronomers could only vaguely determine the shape of the emitting region. Future investigations will help answer the question of what, precisely, they are seeing: a glowing corona around the black hole, an orbiting "hot spot," or a jet of material. Nevertheless, their result represents the first time that observations have gotten down to the scale of the black hole itself, which has a "Schwarzschild radius" of 10 million miles."

For more see:
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/press/2008/pr200816.html

Scientists discover minimum mass for galaxies

By analyzing light from small, faint galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, University of California-Irvine scientists believe they have discovered the minimum mass for galaxies in the universe — 10 million times the mass of the Sun. Study results were published August 28 in Nature.

This mass could be the smallest known "building block" of the mysterious, invisible substance called dark matter. Stars that form within these building blocks clump together and turn into galaxies. Scientists know very little about the microscopic properties of dark matter, even though it accounts for approximately five-sixths of all matter in the universe.

"By knowing this minimum galaxy mass, we can better understand how dark matter behaves, which is essential to one day learning how our universe and life as we know it came to be," says Louis Strigari, lead author of this study and a McCue Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCI.

Dark matter governs the growth of structure in the universe. Without it, galaxies like our own Milky Way would not exist. Scientists know how dark matter's gravity attracts normal matter and causes galaxies to form. They also suspect that small galaxies merge over time to create larger galaxies such as our Milky Way.

The smallest known galaxies, called dwarf galaxies, vary greatly in brightness, from 1,000 times the luminosity of the Sun to 10 million times the luminosity of the Sun. At least 22 of these dwarf galaxies are known to orbit the Milky Way. UCI scientists studied 18 of them using data obtained with the Keck telescope in Hawaii and the Magellan telescope in Chile, with the goal of calculating their masses. By analyzing stars' light in each galaxy, they determined how fast the stars were moving. Using those speeds, they calculated the mass of each galaxy.

The researchers expected the masses to vary, with the brightest galaxy weighing the most and the faintest galaxy weighing the least. But surprisingly all dwarf galaxies had the same mass — 10 million times the mass of the Sun.

Manoj Kaplinghat, a study co-author and physics and astronomy assistant professor at UCI, explains this finding using an analogy in which humans play the role of dark matter. "Suppose you are an alien flying over Earth and identifying urban areas from the concentration of lights in the night. From the brightness of the lights, you may surmise, for example, that more humans live in Los Angeles than in Mumbai, but this is not the case," Kaplinghat says. "What we have discovered is more extreme and akin to saying that all metro areas, even those that are barely visible at night to the aliens, have a population of about 10 million."

Since dwarf galaxies are mostly dark matter — the ratio of dark matter to normal matter is as large as 10,000 to one — the minimum-mass discovery reveals a fundamental property of dark matter. The scientists say clumps of dark matter may exist that contains no stars. The only dark matter clumps they can detect right now are those that are lit by stars.

Origin of high energy emission in Crab pulsar

Here's another wonderful press release on the origin of high energy emission from the Crab pulsar.

Using ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory, scientists (Professor Tony Dean of the University of Southampton and collegues) have been able to locate where particles in the vicinity of the rotating neutron-star in the Crab Nebula are accelerated to immense energies.

Rotating neutron-stars, or 'pulsars', are known to accelerate particles to enormous energies, typically one hundred times more than the most powerful accelerators on Earth, but scientists are still uncertain exactly how these systems work and where the particles are accelerated.

The Crab Nebula is the result of a supernova explosion which was seen from Earth on 4 July 1054. The explosion left behind a pulsar with a nebula of radiating particles around it. A highly collimated jet, aligned with the spin axis of the pulsar and a bright torus around the pulsar itself, are also seen. So, the Crab is known to accelerate electrons - and possibly other particles - to extremely high speed, and so produces high energy radiation. But where exactly are these particles accelerated?

Looking into the heart of the pulsar with Integral’s spectrometer (SPI), the researchers made a detailed study to assess the polarisation – or the alignment - of the waves of high-energy radiation originating from the Crab.

They used data from more than 600 individual observations of the nebula, and saw that this polarised radiation is highly aligned with the rotation axis of the pulsar. So they concluded that a significant portion of the electrons generating the high-energy radiation must originate from a highly organised structure located very close to the pulsar, very likely directly from the jets themselves. The discovery allows the researchers to discard other theories that locate the origin of this radiation further away from the pulsar.

Glast is now Fermi

The Gamma Ray Large Telescope is now the Fermi Telescope. And there is an all sky image. What do you think of the image? http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/glast_findings_media.html

Chandrayaan I - - India's first Moon mission

I'm not sure how many of you have heard of the Indian Moon mission Chandrayaan-I (Chandra means 'moon' in Indian language). So, a few updates on the Chandrayaan mission.

A few years back, when I was working with the Chandrayaan group, the launch was planned after Astrosat (an upcoming multi-wavelength astronomy satellite), but apparently, this first Indian Moon mission is all set for its launch quite soon (between Oct-Dec), as told by the former ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) chairman Dr. Kasthurirangan.

The mission includes five ISRO (Indian space research organization) payloads and six payloads from other space agencies (NASA, ESA & Bulgarian Aerospace agency). Mission objectives are:

* To carry out high resolution mapping of topographic features in 3D, distribution of various minerals and elemental chemical species including radioactive nuclides covering the entire lunar surface using a set of remote sensing payloads. The new set of data would help in unraveling mysteries about the origin and evolution of solar system in general and that of the moon in particular.

* Realize the mission goal of harnessing the science payloads, lunar craft and the launch vehicle with suitable ground support system including DSN station, integration and testing, launching and achieving lunar orbit of ~100 km, in-orbit operation of experiments, communication/telecommand, telemetry data reception, quick look data and archival for scientific utilization by identified group of scientists.

More info: Chandrayaan homepage

India has already planned its second Moon mission "Chandrayaan II" to launch by 2010/2011 (hoping to land a motorized rover on Moon).

And how did the sky make you feel?

How did the sky make you feel at less than 8 years old? Can you remember? What words would an 8 year old use? How does the universe, and studying it,  make you feel now? Would the words be different?  Can you find any words that are not cliche?  I've been thinking about this since a reporter contacted me in order to write a travel article.   

You can check out the article at the National Post.  In the hardcopy version they reprinted the award-winning NRAO image in, sigh, black and white. Other than that it is a good human interest story. 

With respect to the interview process, some of my expressions the reporter did use and others she didn't.  For example, I believe I said "ummm a beach of stars is too cliche" and she used "beach" - ha ha!  But what I came up with as a substitute was probably too geeky - "a vast scattering of mysterious gems". 

So I now feel that it is important to (re-)articulate how I feel every so often so that when I'm asked I might say something, um, pithy ;-)  It is a real challenge.  I'm curious about how other astronomers express themselves when asked to describe looking at the sky and how it makes them feel. 

Water found on Mars

"The Phoenix lander confirms the existence of martian water." -- This is an interesting press release which I read on Mar's mission Phoenix lander (excerpts from the press release follows).

Laboratory tests aboard NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander have identified water in a soil sample. The lander's robotic arm delivered the sample Wednesday to an instrument that identifies water vapors produced by the heating of samples.

"We have water," says William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA). "We've seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time martian water has been touched and tasted."

The soil sample came from a trench approximately 2 inches deep. When the robotic arm first reached that depth, it hit a hard layer of frozen soil. Two attempts to deliver samples of icy soil on days when fresh material was exposed were foiled when the samples became stuck inside the scoop. Most of the material in Wednesday's sample had been exposed to the air for 2 days, letting some of the water in the sample vaporize away and making the soil easier to handle.

Schoolteacher discovers 'cosmic ghost'

Here's a news about a cosmic ghost discovered by a Dutch school teacher.

"A Dutch schoolteacher has discovered a mysterious and unique astronomical object through the Galaxy Zoo project, which enables members of the public to take part in astronomy research online.."

To read more, go to this website
here

UofM Astro-blog

This is a new blog created for the Astronomers at the University of Manitoba to discuss anything related to astronomy !! I hope to get a good participation from all the Astro members !!